Sestina party handout here.

April is National Poetry Month and if it isn’t April now, it’s going to be April someday, so you better get ready.

I’m working on a sestina.

For sestina, say six.

A sestina is a puzzle of a poem built around six words that repeat 6 times in blocks of six lines according to a six-way pattern.  Then it’s capped off with the six words trundled tightly into 3 lines. Here are the regs and rules.

I used a psycho-random technique to select my six words, jotting down the first interesting word I spotted in each of the six previous days of my journal:

gobble – season  – pulse – planet – nucleus – answer

I copied them out six times, according to the rules of the pattern and doggedly herded syllables, images, and short speeches into the empty places, thinking, write something terrible and you’ll have plenty to tinker with.

It was so terrible I quit in the middle of the third stanza.  Maybe I should have had more of an idea to start with.  Maybe I needed better words:  like fence instead of planet.  Maybe I should check out some examples.

In an oft-cited sestina entitled “Sestina”, Elizabeth Bishop uses the words:

house – grandmother – child – stove – almanac – tears

The resulting sestina is astonishingly beautiful.  Here are some lines from the middle to give you an idea:

…The iron kettle sings on the stove.

She cuts some bread and says to the child

It’s time for tea now; but the child

is watching the teakettle’s small hard tears

dance like mad on the hot black stove

the way the rain must dance on the house.

Tidying up, the grandmother

hangs up the clever almanac

on its string.  Birdlike, the almanac

hovers half open above the child

hovers above the old grandmother

and her cup full of dark brown tears…

A couple weeks later I tinkered with my sestina some more.  Now it’s got

…pulsing gullets of gobblelty

geese, orange beaks reaching to gobble

falling hail…

I could give my sestina

…rich gobbled

minerals, water, atmosphere, a split nucleus

and the dark denied march of the penultimate season

My sestina might even get

…an idea, a planet

whose whirl and what matter a nucleus

binds to a grammar called answers.

 

I think sestinas call for sestina parties.  Divvy up the work, multiply the imagination.  People did stuff like that before they had Netflix, and you can try it at home, too.  The sestina party handout explains the pattern and gives directions for organizing 6 to 36 people to write a sestina over the course of an evening.

Send in an your original sestina by writing a comment to this post.

When filmmaker and activist Michael Moore, spoke in New York City on March 17, 2012, he praised the Occupy movement because it’s grassroots and doesn’t have a hierarchy.
He said, “If you’re living in Boise, Idaho, and you want to start a Occupy Boise, just do it! You don’t have to write into national headquarters here—for permission—and then we’ll take ten percent of the dues that you collect. There’s no grants you have to write. You just have to exercise your constitutional rights as a citizen of this country. And we, those of us here, at least in New York, at Occupy Wall Street, we want you to do this. We don’t want to be in charge of Occupy Boise. You know what Boise needs. And you need to occupy it.”
Idaho. The state that’s somewhere off the edge of the known universe.
Idaho, where a few things have happened that Michael Moore doesn’t know about—yet.
On November 5, 2011, without asking anybody permission, a group of people from Boise and the surrounding region set up an encampment in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement the on the grounds of the old Ada County Courthouse, a piece of land managed by the state of Idaho and located across the way from where the legislature meets. A statement on the website occupyboise.org said, “Enough! How many crises does it take? We are the 99% and we moved to reclaim our mortgaged future.”
In February, 2012, the Idaho state legislature passed HB404, an emergency ban on camping on state-managed lands to take effect immediately.
Then US District Judge B. Lynn Winmill issued a temporary injunction against HB404 on free speech grounds. The judge said the legislation “creates the appearance that the state is stretching to suppress the core political message of Occupy Boise”. The fight continues. I hope Michael Moore keeps up.
Here’s another story from Idaho.
Imagine a company called Imperial Oil. What kinds of things do you suppose a company called Imperial Oil would do? The Imperial Oil that I know of is a subsidiary of Exxon/Mobil. Imperial Oil is working on a scheme to get the pieces of an oil refinery built in Korea, then shipped to northern Canada and assembled at the Alberta Tar Sands.
Now these refinery pieces are big as houses, so the best way to get them to Canada is on roads that go through some backwards empty noplace that nobody ever thinks about. Like Idaho.
Thirty-three of these refinery pieces were floated up the Columbia River system on barges. At Lewiston, Idaho, they were to be loaded onto trailers and teetered over rural highways towards Alberta. Sadly, they made it there. But they were late.
I wonder if Michael Moore knows they were late. They were late because, without asking permission, people from Idaho went out in the middle of winter nights to follow and film these mega-loads as they knocked down power lines and scraped the rock faces of a wild and scenic river canyon. People from Idaho went to court. People from Idaho lay down in the road. People from Idaho made them cut the damn things in half. People from Idaho are making them think twice about shipping any more of those loads through here. People from Idaho want them to ask us for permission.
I think Michael Moore ought to check out this Idaho. Visit awhile. Bring his camera.

There’s a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University who says he has discovered a new law of physics.
Since 1995, Adrian Bejan has been applying and testing what he calls “the constructal law” which, he claims, accounts for the design of all living and non-living things. Design. Scientists panic at the word, he says, in fear they’ll be caught believing in a designer. A single uniform law of design, he says, requires no designer. Asking who put the law there is like asking who started up gravity or who invented conservation of matter and energy.
Everything on the planet, says Bejan, is part of a flow system. Including flow systems. The planet itself is a flow system. The constructal law says that flow systems reconfigure themselves over time to become more efficient. Think: soil erosion.
A tree is a flow system for moving water from underground into the atmosphere, and if you tried to engineer a better structure to do it, you would fail. Ditto river systems. Your lungs. Your circulatory and nervous systems. Their tree-like structure is no accident, says Bejan. Neither are legs, fins, and wings.
Do you ever feel like your life’s work is picking stuff up and putting it down somewhere else? Shuffling paper. Tickling a keyboard to shuffle information. All of us, says Bejan, are structures that facilitate flow. We locomote and carry things. We build wheels, conveyor belts, and vehicles. We pull minerals from the ground. We exchange ideas. Everything we build or make enhances some flow system because our minds mirror the single design principle that’s everywhere. We can’t conceive of anything else.
This is where it starts to get tricky.
Lying on the ground in a lush landscape, I am easily convinced that I’m participating in the mega-flow of The Blue Planet. If that sensation tunes me into a law of physics—that’s cool.
There’s more.
Flow systems reconfigure themselves to be more efficient. Which is to say, as time passes, flow systems change predictably. That, says Bejan is evolution. Nothing more and nothing less.
So we design vehicles that carry more stuff with less energy and travel more densely down highways that erode the neighborhoods in their path. Extraction industries extract and extract. Cities fill up with iron. And with people who suck stuff in and send it to landfills.
It can’t be any other way, Bejan says, and that’s where I get stuck. Because I don’t like that. But the Pope didn’t like it when Copernicus suggested that the earth revolved around the sun, either.
I’ve got questions: How does the constructal law square with the rest of physics: quantum theory, general relativity, and the march towards entropy? Where does genetics fit in? Bejan says that once you understand this concept, it will change the way you see everything. People say that about learning to draw.
The Wikipedia entry for “constructal law” asks for updates and notes, “This reads like advertising”.
It is true, however, that science has little to say about the origin and persistence of design in nature. So I’ve done my part. I’ve passed this idea on to encourage the flow new ones.

20 years or so ago—when all my girlfriends and I were about 20 years younger—we were making families, working on our relationships, building our reputations, and going to therapy.  Therapy was a way to sort things out—staying or going, how to learn patience, wondering if you’re crazy.  Therapy gave me a lot of ideas for just plain getting along.

One of the things that I learned in therapy that helped me a lot was an idea about how all children have problems, real and imaginary.  As children, we develop the very best tools we can to deal with them.  Little people invent little tools, even for big problems, and sometimes stick with those tools, even if they don’t work, because those are the best tools they can come up with.  By the time we become adults, using those tools and not expecting them to be effective is a habit.  It’s not unusual, in the face of a familiar type of problem, for people to use those familiar tools that never work harder, and faster.  Kind of like hitting a stuck nail with a bigger screwdriver.

You try to unpack all that by looking at your knee-jerk reactions to things.  What you do when someone else gets mad.  How you respond to advice.  What you think is funny.  You start to see some patterns.  They show you how you shoot yourself in the foot.  Then, with some combination of pep talks and reflection, you “work on” yourself, try to get a set of behaviors, or tools, that will bring you more satisfaction.

Now I don’t want to make light of this process, because it’s served me well, but by now I’ve come to a point where I’m just going to have to be good enough and do whatever it is I’m doing with the tools I’ve got.  It’s time to accept that these tools are part of who I am, especially the ones I’ve had since I was two.

If it seems like everybody has tools that I lack, I have a little pep talk I give myself about how that’s a sign that I’m unique.  Embrace your faults, I say, and use that information to stay out of trouble.  Appreciate your friends.  Be satisfied with what you do, admire it even.  It makes me think about a round of applause for the life I’ve cobbled together with my oddball toolbox.

Which is not to say that I don’t believe in self-improvement. But nowadays, instead of working on my personality, I’m working on my attitude.

One evening about 10 years ago, I was sitting in my living room, shuffling maps and imagining possibilities for a year’s worth of travel, when one of my daydreams ran straight through to the moment to where I’d return to this very place, a changed person.  I looked up at my surroundings.  Stuff.  A house full of it.  Worn out stuff.  The remnants of a flown family.  I would forget all this stuff while I was gone, and as I imagined it greeting me on my return, I felt like I weighed 600 pounds.

So I gave away all my stuff—everything but my bed and a stash that fit under it.  Getting it gone was harder than just having a wish and some resolve.

I told all my friends to come haul away whatever they wanted.  A lot of them showed up to help me reactivate my attachments.  You don’t want to give away this basket.  You can keep towels in it.   You always need towels.  Or they’d ask me which things I wanted them to have.  Or say, Just remember I have this table in case you ever want it back.

That was Lesson #1:  People are attached to you being attached to your stuff.

It’s also physically hard to get rid of your stuff.  You have to pick it up, load it up, take it somewhere.  I also think every object contains a little ghost born of your history with it and every time you touch it, the little ghost escapes for a flight around the room.  Jostle all your stuff and the air is thick with ghosts—crashing into one another, comparing details, and pestering you to sit down and reminisce.  Whole afternoons can disappear.  You have to persevere.

My house was so beautiful when it was empty.  I wish I could say it stayed that way.  Oh do I wish.

I came home from traveling knowing I wanted to be here, to live here.  I missed my garden and my roots.  The renters left behind a table and a couch.  I replaced my stockpile of food.  You really do need boots and winter clothes.  Garden tools.  Books.  Fleece, yarn, and fiber.  Houseplants.  Bedding…

That’s been lesson #2.  Stuff abhors a vacuum.  You let one little thing in and there’s a whole flood behind it.

I want that empty house back.  That’s the spring project.  We just had another dump of snow, so it’s likely to be another month before I can drive a vehicle up here and start hauling stuff away.  But I’ve set up the staging area, and things are migrating there: Salvation Army, used book store, landfill, bonfire…

Do you know what the Lone Ranger said to Tonto when they were jouncing down the road with a pickup load of useless stuff?

To the dump, to the dump, to the dump, dump, dump.

A number of scholars—Dean Hamer, Rodney Stark, and Andrew Greeley to name a few–argue strongly that the presence of religion and religious faith are inevitable in healthy human societies.  They say a predisposition to religious belief is part of human nature.  They argue that the mystery of death creates deep needs that only religion can meet.  Sociologist Paul Zuckerman suggests this notion comes not from essential knowledge of human nature, but a projection of the writers’ own fears about death onto the rest of humanity.

Upon arriving in Denmark for a 14 month stay, Zuckerman was immediately struck by the absence of religion as he had grown accustomed to it in the United States.  There was no televangelism.  Sporting events did not begin with prayers to Jesus.   Political ideas based in religious beliefs were considered unsound. There was no push to teach creationism in school, and no nationalized movements against homosexuality or abortion.  So he set out to interview as many Danes as possible to understand their ideas about God, religion, death and the meaning of life and reports his results in a book entitled Society Without God.

You might think that Denmark has achieved a complete separation of church and state.  Quite the contrary.  Lutheranism is the national religion of Denmark.  The state maintains churches and pays pastors with taxes that Danish citizens can choose to pay or not.  Most do.  Danes don’t attend church regularly, but consider churches peaceful, contemplative places and like having them around.  People say they go to church mostly for the social engagement, that church events on religious holidays such as Christmas and Easter bring families together.  Many people baptize their children, not for spiritual reasons, but because it’s an occasion to introduce the new family member to the community.  Confirmation, for adolescents, is an occasion for lots of presents.  People get married in churches because they say it provides the right atmosphere.

In his interviews, Zuckerman covered a wide range of topics with his subjects, establishing rapport with questions about work, family and community.  While this portion of the conversation was often lively, when the topic switched to religion, things often went flat, as if, he said,  “the topic of conversation had suddenly switched to the price of cardboard.”   People weren’t against religion, they were indifferent to it.  Sometimes he asked people if they believed in God and they answered, “I’ve never really given it much thought.”

Zuckerman was surprised by the level of cognitive dissonance Danes seemed to have in matters of religion.  It wasn’t unusual for people who didn’t believe that Jesus was God, or didn’t believe in God at all, to call themselves Christians and agree that Denmark was a Christian country.  When asked to elaborate, they equated Christianity with being kind, doing good, and helping people, and were often perplexed that should require a belief in God.

In the US, one of the arguments you hear for the mixing of religion and politics is that a society not tempered by religion will descend into strife, and suffering.  That’s hardly the case in Denmark, which regularly scores at or near the top in international surveys that measure people’s happiness and security.  Education and health care.  Danes count on a social safety net that prevents them from becoming homeless and will care for them in old age.    It’s as though Denmark went straight to the heart of how it perceived the Christian message—be kind, do good, help people—without having to arrive at it by way of religion.

When I was in high school, the selectric typewriter was at the cutting edge of technology.  In our physics books, which did go up as far as E = mc², the smallest particles were protons, neutrons and electrons, and the Big Bang was a fantasy, not a theory.

The ensuing decades have added new vocabulary—quarks, charm, superstrings—and new concepts, too.  But I don’t know what they are.

Is it important to know?  I don’t even know that, but I’m willing to hear science out on the topic—if I can.  Physicist and mathematician Brian Greene takes 569 pages to lay it all out for the average reader in his book, The Fabric of the Cosmos:  Space, time, and the texture of reality.  I’m giving it a go.  I’m on page 50.

Any explanation of special relativity always seems to start out by setting up an imaginary situation where light beams and moving objects can be tracked by observers who are also moving.  In the versions I remember, you were asked to picture railroad cars where flashlights are being turned on and off, while the cars themselves pass each other going in opposite directions.  All the while, observers in the cars and on the platform take measurements.  Brian Greene uses updated imagery and asks us instead to imagine Bart Simpson on a nuclear powered skateboard trying to chase down a beam of light while Lisa takes the measurements.

The upshot is that there’s more to it than just saying that nothing goes faster than the speed of light or that someone blasted away in a light-speed rocket would come home years later much younger than everyone who stayed behind.

The description of the theory with its various observers, their relative speeds and differing measurements probably helped give rise to a notion linking the “theory of relativity” to the idea that “everything is relative.”

Albert Einstein thought “the theory of relativity” was an inappropriate name for his idea.  He preferred to call it “the theory of invariance” because there’s a whole lot more than the speed of light that doesn’t change.

Everything travels at the speed of light.  Everything.  You, me, Bart Simpson’s skateboard, we are all traveling at the speed of light through spacetime.  Not space-and-time, but spacetime—multiple dimensions, some of them in space and one of them in time.

A person standing still on a bicycle is whizzing straight through the time dimension of spacetime at the speed of light.  When the person starts to pedal, the velocity of the bike doesn’t change, but its direction in spacetime does.  While the bike continues to cruise through spacetime at the speed of light, its motion in the space dimensions decreases its motion through time.  Even at top speeds through space, people, bicycles, and rockets are traveling mostly through time.  Light—unlike people, bicycles, and rockets—can travel entirely in the space dimensions.  So “the speed of light” is actually short for “the speed of light traveling exclusively through space.”  And only light can do that.

What’s relative in special relativity are space and time.  They exist in tandem.  What’s invariant is velocity.  Everything is moving always at the speed of light—sometimes straight through space (like light), sometimes straight through time (like an object at rest), and sometimes through both (like any material thing that is moving).

I had to go take a walk to think that over.  I marveled at myself locomoting across a field and through the minutes at the speed of light.  I guess the distance from one moment to the next is a whole lot farther than we think, because we have to go awful fast just to get there.

The other day at the woodpile, I did something dumb, and a chunk of wood kicked back and clobbered me across the knuckles. In an instant, I’m striding across the yard, gonna put some distance between myself and the hollow tube of pain radiating from my pinkie finger to my shoulder.  It’s going to pass, so hurry up.  I’m irked that this is happening.  I pace stupidly a while and fail to distract myself from the pain.  I take off my glove for a look.  A little cut, and all the fingers are swelling.  But everything passes the wiggle test.   I put ice on it.  It hurts.  I spend the evening annoyed and disappointed with myself because nothing’s getting done.

Next morning the day is new, the swelling is down and the injury has been reduced to a science project—the scab on the cut, the marbly bruises, how its puffed.  Overall, though, it’s the same hand it was last week, just a little banged up.  So maybe it was a little scary.  My life wouldn’t be my life if my hands weren’t my hands.

I wonder what it is like to have someone look you in the eye and smash your hand, breaking the bones, because they didn’t like the way you answered their questions.

Once I fell off my bicycle and dislocated my shoulder and I didn’t like that at all.  I remember lying on the couch trying to visualize golden healing light and all I could see was bloody meat.

Sometimes they’ll string a person up by the wrists and the weight of the body rips the shoulder socket apart.  It’s a tactic to get the person to cooperate.  Maybe they leave the person’s clothes on.  Maybe they do other things to the person who is hanging there.

Once I flung a wet bathtowel over a clothesline that was too close to an electric fence.  My whole torso was rocked by a jolt that came in through my fingertips.

For some people torture is just a job.  Some dads don’t talk much about their work.

When the Abu Ghraib story was breaking, I happened to visit a friend who pumped the news into his life nonstop.  The radio or the television, not terribly loud, but constantly bludgeoning you with its information.  .

Can’t you turn that off?  I demanded.

“If I was in a place like that,” he said, “I would want people to know about it.”

Once when I was visiting the island of LaGonave in Haiti, I taught an informal class for a group of teachers trying to advance their careers with a knowledge of English.  As an exercise, we translated a short article entitled, “Why Save Seeds.”

I chose the selection because there is a strong grassroots movement on LaGonave to raise food locally instead of importing it.  Churches, schools, and community groups were hungry for seeds and technical advice for vegetable gardening and improved yields of local crops like corn, beans, manioc, and sorghum.  So everyone, I figured, would have ideas already about seed saving, food independence, and the preservation of diversity talked about in the article.

Each session we did a paragraph.  I helped them identify the major vocabulary words, and guided them in puzzling out a Creole translation. We got bogged down with genetically modified organisms.

We were okay with organism.  We were okay with modification.  But genetically… genetic material…genes.  I could see from their faces that they weren’t so sure about this.  The Creole-English dictionary entry for gene is jenn.  OK, so what’s a jenn? Blank looks.  Someone volunteers, Do you mean the jèm?  Nods of understanding all around.  I’m suspicious of how the word jèm sounds like germ, as in wheat germ.  I dunno, I say.  This jèm, can you see it?  Someone nods confidently and explains where, exactly, you find the the jèm in a grain of corn.  Nope, I said, if you can see it, that’s not it.

How many movies and filmstrips of cell mitosis did I see during my education?  Chromosomes, wandering randomly around inside the nucleus suddenly pair up like contra dancers.  Each pair makes a copy of itself and two identical groups march to opposite sides of the nucleus, which then splits in half like a soap bubble.

These teachers didn’t have movies, filmstrips and discussion groups in their education.  They had recitation and memorization.  They didn’t necessarily have text books.  They didn’t have the mental images of cell division that were second nature to me.

DNA, I ventured, do you know about that?  Together they came up with the syllables of deoxyribonucleic acid.  I was in grade school when the tinkertoy helix of DNA was on the cover of Life magazine.  When they were in grade school, anybody who wanted to be somebody got on a leaky boat aimed for Miami, Cuba, or Venezuela.

I dropped back closer to what I figured could be the beginning.  Inside of every seed is all the information necessary to make the whole and entire plant correctly.  That’s the DNA.  The genetic material.   Inside a carrot seed is all the genetic material for making a carrot.  A cabbage seed, with its genetic material for making cabbage, would never grow leaves that looked like a carrot.

I had truly lost them.  They were giving me that look you sometimes get in a conversation where someone started out thinking you had something useful to offer them, but it turned out you were so stupid they could hardly be polite about it.  Why would anyone think you might plant a row of cabbage seeds and have carrots come up instead?

Before the next session, I downloaded simulations of cell activities from youtube.  Mitosis, the DNA helix unzipping itself.  Of course they were fascinated.  These things are really going on all the time inside your body?  How did they take these videos?

How do I say that they’re simulations, but they should take them as evidence anyway?  I thought we were going to review some elementary science.  Instead, I found out that I had a theory of the invisible that I couldn’t communicate.

Mathematicians will sometimes tell you that their discipline is akin to art and poetry.  Like artists and poets, mathematicians have a hard time saying what it is they do, but they sure do know it when they see it.  One thing that sets math apart is that you can get actual jobs doing it.

One of the peculiar things about math is that it lives in the imagination and has tentacles in the here and now.  The tangible, visible things one might do while doing math—writing stuff down, drawing pictures, assembling objects—all that supports a mental activity.   An activity involving patterns and the laws of physics.  Or would it be the laws of the universe?  Or the laws of the mind?  It’s hard to get a mathematician to tell you.  They’d usually rather do math that talk about it to people who don’t do it.

There is general agreement on where math came from and how it progressed.

First counting got started:  1, 2, 3…, leaving its early evidence in notched bones and Sumerian tablets.

The Greeks experimented with geometry.

Thinking about proportion put numbers in relation to one another:  9/10, 2/3 and that’s how we got fractions.

Someone had to invent negative numbers to deal with certain commercial transactions and gambling debts.

The Arabs invented zero to keep the positives and negatives from crashing into each other.

Somebody worked out how to translate numbers into geometry and geometry into numbers.

Somebody looked for the square root of negative one and couldn’t find it, so they invented the imaginary numbers so the square root of negative one could exist.

Then somebody worked out how to turn logic into numbers and numbers into logic.  That made it possible to use and numbers and logic to prove that there will always be reasonable questions numbers and logic can’t answer.

Then came the machines, lightspeed jungle-gyms of numbers and logic so fast that they seem more capable than us.

How much does it matter that we insert these machines between ourselves and the rest of the world?

Let’s back up to the beginning. To when counting got started.  Somewhere, sometime, for some folks.  But not for everyone.  Counting doesn’t seem to come with being human, the way language does.  Every human society uses language and everybody’s language is equally complex.  Some societies, however, do not count, never figured out how, never learned it from someone else.

Doesn’t that make you want to know about the intellectual life of these non-counting cultures, what it’s like when mindpower isn’t fettered to the rhythms and structures that grow out of counting?  You’ll get laughed off the stage with that question.  What’s to learn from a few island pockets of loser cultures where life is brutish and short?

Yet there is the possibility of a shimmering net, a sort of mycelium spreading out over our collective minds from a spore called counting.  It would be tricky to see out from under that.